Low-Complexity System and Algorithm for an Emergency Ventilator Sensor and Alarm

In response to the shortage of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have designed low-cost emergency ventilators. Many of these devices are pressure-cycled pneumatic ventilators, which are easy to produce but often do not include the sensing or alarm features found on comm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-06
Main Authors: Corey, Ryan M, Widloski, Evan M, Null, David, Ricconi, Brian, Johnson, Mark, White, Karen, Amos, Jennifer R, Pagano, Alex, Oelze, Michael, Switzky, Rachel, Wheeler, Matthew B, Bethke, Eliot, Shipley, Clifford, Singer, Andrew C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Alarm systems
Algorithms
Complexity
COVID-19
Emergency response
Hearing aids
Low cost
Malfunctions
Microcontrollers
Pressure sensors
Respiratory rate
Sensors
Signal processing
Ventilators
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Summary:In response to the shortage of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have designed low-cost emergency ventilators. Many of these devices are pressure-cycled pneumatic ventilators, which are easy to produce but often do not include the sensing or alarm features found on commercial ventilators. This work reports a low-cost, easy-to-produce electronic sensor and alarm system for pressure-cycled ventilators that estimates clinically useful metrics such as pressure and respiratory rate and sounds an alarm when the ventilator malfunctions. A low-complexity signal processing algorithm uses a pair of nonlinear recursive envelope trackers to monitor the signal from an electronic pressure sensor connected to the patient airway. The algorithm, inspired by those used in hearing aids, requires little memory and performs only a few calculations on each sample so that it can run on nearly any microcontroller.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2006.03664